Yiddish learning in modernity is partially defined by its relation to the educational form of the summer intensive. The YIVO summer program is the longest running and most famous, but in recent decades Yiddish summer intensive programs have reached across the globe, both to places with complex historical relationships with their Jewish populations (such as the programs in Berlin and Warsaw), as well as the relatively recent phenomenon of a Jewish locale with a complex relationship with the Yiddish language – that is, the State of Israel. The Naomi Prawer Kadar International Yiddish Summer Program at Tel Aviv University, which I attended this summer with the financial support of the Naomi Foundation and its eponymous fellowship, is frequently regarded as one of the best currently active Yiddish summer programs. As such, I looked forward to the opportunity to improve my Yiddish in a unique setting.
I began learning Yiddish in the summer of 2021 in the YIVO summer program (on Zoom). There, our coursework was divided into grammar, literature, and conversation sections. At the Naomi program, I was assigned to the Goldrich Advanced Seminar, and as such the divide between sections was necessarily less marked. Instead, we effectively had two literature seminars, the first led by Dr. Miriam Trinh and the second by Dr. David Roskies, both conducted entirely in Yiddish. Dr. Trinh’s section put an emphasis on grammatical points and the ability to converse in an academic vernacular in Yiddish alongside the literature we discussed (notably, a selection of poems by the recently deceased Rivka Basman Ben-Hayim, and the opening chapters of Moyshe Kulbak’s classic novel Moshiekh Ben-Efrayim). Dr. Trinh’s instruction is widely renowned in the Yiddishist community, and rightly so: she led a challenging and immensely informative course, as well as providing us opportunities to present and speak at length in Yiddish, providing rigorous and detailed feedback without disrupting the fluency of our speech.
Dr. Roskies’ seminar was pitched as an overview of Yiddish Modernism, the contents of which were recently and thoroughly) detailed by him in an article for Tablet. Roskies is an inspired lecturer and imparted through his instruction a genuine enthusiasm for the liveliness and experimentation of the Yiddish modernists, whose contribution to the corpus of Yiddish literature is both immense and often overlooked, the most famous figures (such as Glatshteyn and Halpern) notwithstanding.
We also had a conversational Yiddish section, led by Rabbi Motl Gordon. Rabbi Gordon dedicated our sessions to cultivating a “natirlekh yidish” (natural Yiddish). That is, he emphasized conversational strategies, turns of phrase, vocabulary, and other factors which contribute to the feel of natural, fluent speech in Yiddish. Additionally, he was unafraid to let students broach the political situation that currently grips Israel in their conversation, providing thoughtful responses to both the content and structure of our speech.
These classes formed the core of our Yiddish instruction at Tel Aviv University, and more than justify its present reputation as a great place to learn Yiddish. I came away from these sections with my Yiddish greatly improved, and having made connections with Yiddishists from around the world that I expect I will maintain for years to come.
I feel that I would be remiss on a moral level not to address in some greater detail the current political situation in Israel. As such, and with a desire to maintain this article’s overall orientation towards Yiddish and Yiddish education, I am attaching here a Yiddish-language news report from my friend Ethel Niborski, who lives in Israel and contributes to the Forverts. The anti-democratic atmosphere of the current Israeli government is not without precedent. The same attitudes that led to the repression of Yiddish language many years ago have been unrelentingly applied with much greater force (both legal and physical) to Israeli minority groups and to the Palestinian people as a whole, who continue to live under military occupation.
